The 25th Anniversary Of The Computer Virus

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversry of the computer virus (at least the virus as we commonly think of it). Elk Cloner was the first virus that spread “in the wild,” and it was written by a then 9th grader named Rich Skrenta.

Skrenta just posted a reminescnce of that time on his blog:

It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack.

Back then nothing was networked. We had these computers in a lab, and there was software for them on floppy disks. You stick in the disk and run the software. Simple.

The aha moment was when I realized I could essentially get my program to move around by itself. I could give it its own motive force, by having it hide in the resident RAM of the machine between floppy changes, and hitching a ride onto the next floppy that would be inserted. Whoa. That would be cool.

Insight without implementation is worthless, so to work I went.

Elk Cloner was annoying, but hardly destructive. Every fifty times an infected system was booted Elk Cloner printed out the following poem

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Ah the good old days!

[Trivia note for Apple fanboys: Elk Cloner was written for and infected the Apple II's operating system.]

photo credit